Climate Change

Like a spear thrusting into the Gulf of Mexico’s gut, the Isle de Jean Charles is turbulent with ruinous daily oil and gas accidents, rising sea levels, and tropical storms. Homes on the Isle de Jean Charles perch on delicate wooden stilts thirteen feet high, their paint peeling in the sun. A solitary road snakes down the spine of the shrinking island. Stained American flags billow slowly in the Gulf breeze, affixed to porches where one can catch the nasal tones of plaid-clad men bantering in Cajun French.

While some pledges made in the United Nations Charter have been met, “others have come to noting,” the President of Bolivia told the General Assembly today, that the planet’s precious resources and vulnerable people must be protected from greed and exploitation by political elites.

Deployed to the Houston area to assist in Hurricane Harvey relief efforts, U.S. military forces hadn’t even completed their assignments when they were hurriedly dispatched to Florida, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands to face Irma, the fiercest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean.

GREGORY WILPERT: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Gregory Wilpert, joining you from Quito, Ecuador. This coming Sunday, Germans will head to the polls to elect a new Bundestag, as its parliament is known. Chancellor Angela Merkel's party, the Christian Democratic Union, is leading in opinion polls with between 36% and 39% of the vote.

The cities of San Francisco and Oakland are suing some of the world’s largest oil companies over climate change, joining an emerging legal effort to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for the damages wrought by rising seas.

The suits, filed separately in Superior Court in San Francisco and Alameda County and announced Wednesday, claim that a slate of oil, gas and coal producers not only caused the heat-trapping gases that drove sea level rise but knowingly did so, a challenge akin to litigation against big tobacco companies in the 1990s.

For all the jokes from predictable corners about the Florida-man proposal to shoot down Hurricane Irma, the prize for most futile climate-change-deterrence strategy belongs to far more culpable parties. As we approach Hurricane Sandy’s five year anniversary, New York politicians deserve serious consideration for the title.

Pacific Northwest forests are on fire. Several blazes are out of control, threatening rural towns, jumping rivers and highways, and covering Portland, Oregon, Seattle, and other cities in smoke and falling ash. Temperatures this summer are an average of 3.6 degrees higher than the last half of the 20th century, according to the University of Washington Climate Impacts Group analysis published in The Seattle Times.

For a classic summary of liberal positions on climate, look no further than Naomi Oreskes. If Ecosocialists ever wanted a target of critique of "mainstream", progressive, NGO environmentalism, this is it.

"Global warming is "Fake News", a "Chinese Hoax". So says a richly funded Conservative movement that's become a world-wide campaign. In her book, The Merchants of Doubt, Harvard historian of science, Naomi Oreskes traces how this propaganda war started and how to fight it."

More than a program for economic and ecological renewal Naomi Klein’s No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need is a thoughtful analysis of how we have arrived at this point in our politics. Both rigorous and readable it is hard to put down. It spares no one, not its readers, the media, nor even the author herself. This book can elicit the kind of self-reflective activism we desperately need.

As Hurricane Irma approaches Florida this weekend, just over a week after Hurricane Harvey devastated southeast Texas and left at least 70 people dead, the climate change debate has taken on a new sense of urgency.